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And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself
Hot- hooded and dark- blooded, rescued the rose
From nature, each time he saw it, making it,
As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.
— Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal15
Wars of the Roses
Ideology Versus Experiment
The eighteenth- century Enlightenment was a giddy time for botanists, gar-
deners, and flower lovers of all stripes. So many tantalizing questions! Did plants have sex
or didn’t they? If they did, did they also have feelings and passions, or were they numb to
all sensations and emotions? Did modest corn silks actually blush on making contact with
a wind- blown pollen grain? Were flowers miniature nuptial beds upon which frenzied mar-
riage rites were enacted? Did aroused stamens literally vibrate with anticipation in the pres-
ence of a wet, receptive stigma? Or were all such claims lewd slanders against the virginal
purity of flowers, intended to corrupt female morals? The jury was still out, but whichever
side one took, the heated debate made gardens— those erstwhile havens designed for sen-
sory pleasure as well as for pious reflection— even more fascinating places in which to spend
one’s time.
Of course, much of the debate missed the point. The only scientific question at stake was
whether plants reproduced sexually, not whether they had feelings. But for many opponents
of the sexual theory, sexuality itself, with or without feelings, equated with carnality— the
sinful indulgence of the flesh. As long as flowers were thought of as purely feminine, the
subject of concupiscence did not arise, and many found the new two- sex model disgust-
ing and abhorrent. J. G. Siegesbeck’s vitriolic outburst against the Linnaean sexual system
came closer to physical revulsion than to mere scientific disagreement. There is a disturbing
scene in the 1992 movie The Crying Game in which an IR A foot soldier discovers— at an
extremely awkward moment in the bedroom— that his new girlfriend has a penis. She is,
in fact, a pre- op transgender female, and, at the moment of discovery, Fergus reflexively
vomits.
One suspects that Siegesbeck and other horrified asexualists were responding viscerally
to the dissonant news of the presence of male sexual organs in flowers, which they had
always conceived of as parthenogenically female. By the eighteenth century, the flower, a